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Dr. Chuck Murry, right, a stem-cell researcher at UW Medicine/UW School of Medicine, hears a question from Sen. Patty Murray, back to camera, as Dr. Francis Collins, left, director of the NIH, listens during a tour at South Lake Union campus on Tuesday.

Ken Lambert

Ken Lambert

U.S. health research funding critical, NIH head tells UW meet

August 12, 2014

Carol M. Ostrom

Seattle Times health reporter

In a whirlwind tour through UW Medicine’s research laboratories in South Lake Union, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), swung easily through a show-and-tell that ranged from a dish full of lab-created beating human heart cells to a gene-deletion step in deciphering how immune systems respond to scary viruses such as dengue and Ebola.

He and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray were in Seattle on Tuesday on a different mission: to impress upon everyone the seriousness of a potential budget crisis for NIH.